


(don't) turn around

by renaissance



Series: Pynch Week 2016 [1]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous Character Death, Canon Temporary Character Death, M/M, Orpheus and Eurydice Myth, The Raven King Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 11:34:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7756216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renaissance/pseuds/renaissance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <i>He winds down the windows, all the windows, and invites in the rain. He switches tracks on the CD player. Rivulets run down his arm as the Murder Squash song blares a death fugue, marking his processional—the BMW his hearse, Ronan its undertaker, its corpse. He turns up the volume.</i>
  </p>
</blockquote><br/>Pynch Week day 1 – Mythology
            </blockquote>





	(don't) turn around

**Author's Note:**

> Here we go! I found out about [Pynch Week](http://pynchweek.tumblr.com) roughly 24 hours ago and I thought, why the hell not. So these will be mostly written on the fly but I'm planning on posting a one-shot each day if I can. For day 1 I've chosen the mythology AU prompt, although this is not so much an AU as canon divergence for the end of TRK. I'm working with one of my favourite myths, the story of Orpheus' journey to the Underworld to save Eurydice. A suggested soundtrack is "Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)" and "It's Never Over (Oh Orpheus)" by Arcade Fire, the latter of which echoes this fic's title.
> 
> Thanks to Billie for looking over this and for initially uttering the phrase "tragic Murder Squash song death fugue." You're a champ!
> 
> A note of caution: I've chosen not to use archive warnings for this one because I think "Major Character Death" is too strong a tag, but I've included some appropriate warnings in the freeform tags.

And it’s still raining, like the sky has never known anything else, clouds marking an endless grey from one horizon to the other, and over the mountains and out of sight. The puddles grow around them like cracks in the road, petals adrift on the surface of the water around Ronan’s feet, around his knees as he sinks to the ground. He lets the rain weigh him down as it clings to his clothes and anchors him to the earth, the furthest away from his dreams he’s ever been. It’s slipping—it’s all slipping.

“Ronan,” someone says, and all he can hear is Adam’s voice, Adam’s hands around his neck, his long fingers and his bright eyes, blindfolded.

The fuck does he care? They might be able to  save Gansey on their own. Blue can give him the kiss of life, or whatever it is she does. Take with one hand, give with the other. The water sluices between Ronan’s fingers like Cabeswater slides out of existence, consumed by the demon, by nothingness—and maybe it’s still there somewhere, but Adam isn’t, so what does it matter?

“Ronan,” someone says again, but it’s not Adam, and it’s not Gansey, and Ronan doesn’t want to talk to anyone else ever again.

_This isn’t how it was meant to happen._

He folds further into himself, his head to his knees and his wrists desperately to his mouth, his teeth around his bracelets so he has something to cling to. He can’t tell where the rain ends and his tears begin, or whether there even needs to be a boundary. It’s raining because he’s crying, he’s crying because it’s raining. Adam is gone. Gansey is dead.

“Ronan,” Blue says, and of course it’s Blue, hovering a respectable distance away from him, so composed—he envies that.

“What was the point?” he says. “What the fuck was the point of any of it?”

What’s the point of a sacrifice if no-one is saved? Cabeswater gave life to Gansey, and Gansey gave his life for Cabeswater, and Cabeswater took Adam with it— _I will be your hands, I will be your eyes_ —and the demon, Ronan’s demon, it won. What’s a sacrifice if it can’t reverse that much damage?

“There has to be a way!” Henry shouts. “He can’t just—they can’t—”

“I don’t know what to do,” Blue says, a quiet admission of weakness. Does she expect Ronan to be the strong one?

Henry says again, “There has to be something you can do! Some—some magic?”

That gets Ronan. “I can’t do shit!” he snaps, reeling back up. The rain stings his eyes, which he’ll never close again. “There’s nothing.”

For all his dreams, everything he’d wished into existence, there’s nothing. He has nothing to show for all he made but a demon, a proud darkness, unmaking everything with impunity. The Orphan Girl—Matthew—where were they now?

The rain glows an off yellow, pale and rough around the edges. Ronan’s vision blurs. At some distant liminality his dreams are spilling into reality, the line between his two worlds fading into the night. He never wants to dream again—

—but then, isn’t that the only way to set this right? To negotiate with the demon? To _dream_?

He gets to his feet, impossibly-coloured petals clinging to his wet clothes. The road stretches ahead of him either way: to Henrietta, to his second home, or back to Cabeswater—to where Cabeswater used to be. And he knows what he has to do.

He leaves a deluge in his wake as he walks back to the BMW, parked at an angle with the doors still flung open. Any other time, he might have worried about the wet seats, the mud he’s tracking over this memory of his father, but right now, in this light, he only cares about making this right. If he can.

Henry, for all that he doesn’t understand what it means to have this power and no way to use it, is infectious, in his… not enthusiasm, but something more raw. Something that comes from a place that Ronan can understand, even if he doesn’t follow the path it takes to manifestation. He grabs hold of the end of that thread and yanks hard.

“Hey!” Blue calls. “Where are you going?”

Ronan’s already shut the doors behind him. “To Cabeswater.”

“I don’t follow,” Henry says, jogging up to Blue’s side. “Didn’t it disappear?”

He is politic in his choice of words, but he’s still right. Cabeswater disappeared. But that’s what a dream is—it’s the echo of something that isn’t real anymore, a subconsciously remembered thought, feeling, place.

“You can’t just leave us here,” Blue says. She pulls at the door handle—it’s locked. Ronan doesn’t remember locking it.

“I’ll see you soon,” he says.

He might be lying. The wind he whips up as he presses down on the accelerator is enough to drown out Henry shouting, Blue running behind the car as Ronan drives away from Henrietta.

At so many miles an hour, the rain is lost the moment it hits the car, a steady downpour dispelled like Ronan is drawing a knife through it. He thinks if he cut this night open, it would burst out like flowers in full bloom and every sound, every light, every word that had passed between the group of them. Between Ronan and Gansey, Ronan and Adam. He winds down the windows, all the windows, and invites in the rain. He switches tracks on the CD player. Rivulets run down his arm as the Murder Squash song blares a death fugue, marking his processional—the BMW his hearse, Ronan its undertaker, its corpse. He turns up the volume.

The mountains claim the skyline as their own. Ronan stops the car before he gets to Cabeswater—where Cabeswater used to be—unable to bear being any closer. This is close enough, here, on the ley line, in this presence of so much magic. And it’s surprisingly easy to fall asleep like this, rain on the roof of the car keeping a steady crescendo with electronica that should be loud enough to drown it out, but isn’t.

Ronan closes his eyes.

It isn’t immediately apparent that he’s dreaming. He can feel the shift in his presence, that familiar lucidity—he curls his fingers into a fist just to check that he still has control over this landscape. He does.

When he opens his eyes again, it doesn’t look the same. It looks like the absence of colour he sees when he closes his eyes, and all the tiny points of light that populate his vision. Dizzying and so inherently wrong, it takes Ronan some time to acclimatise to the way this dream feels. He reaches out to steady himself on something, but there’s nothing.

“Cabeswater?” he tries. “Adam?”

A voice so deep he doesn’t hear it at all rings through Ronan’s bones. “Gone.”

“I know _that_ ,” he snaps. “But this is my dream. I’m asserting my authority. Give him back.”

“And the other one?” the demon asks.

 _Gansey_. “You take Cabeswater,” Ronan says. He refuses to let his voice waver. “Unmake it, or whatever the fuck you do. Give me Gansey and Adam.”

“I will be your hands,” the demon says, “I will be your eyes.”

Ronan doesn’t know how to be patient. He stamps his foot, but it doesn’t connect with any ground. Somehow, he stays balanced. “Give them back!”

This time when the demon speaks, Ronan feels its timbre, but Adam’s voice reverberates in his eardrums: “I will be your hands. I will be your eyes.”

“He’s not yours to take,” Ronan says. He’s not scared. He’s not scared.

The demon just laughs.

“He’s not yours!” Ronan says again. “He’s not anyone’s.”

His words echo in this cavern, bouncing off walls he can’t see. The demon falls silent, like a rush of air leaving Ronan’s lungs. Ronan stands static, waiting for something, any signal. Nothing comes. Nothing. He takes a step forward, his feet sure on the unsteady ground, and pushes through the dream.

The pinprick lights flicker around him, parting like a fog and suspended like fireflies. Ronan can’t see himself until he makes contact with a swathe of tiny dots, a spectrum from red through green and blinding white—the sparks illuminate his arm, his fingers, for a second at a time. He moves more vigorously until his own form strobes in and out of existence, solid enough to be real.

Persistence pays off, and the darkness parts for a familiar forest. The last time Ronan was here, he saw unutterable horrors. Now it’s returned to normal. There’s none of the ugliness—but there’s none of the life either. This is a replica of the original, a memory of Cabeswater. It doesn’t respond to Ronan like Cabeswater would. He wills sunlight and blustering leaves and schools of shimmering fish, but his memory is dark, damp, unrelentingly cold.

There is one thing, though, through dead trees and dying leaves, there’s Adam, who Ronan might have been wishing for more than anything else. Ronan calls to Adam, but no words come out. He clears his throat, takes a few steps forward. Adam seems to remain at the same distance. Ronan tries to shout this time; again, the soundless gasping is all he can manage.

“He is here,” the demon says. “Safe, with Cabeswater.”

“That’s not good enough,” Ronan says. “I need him back out there in the real world. And Gansey too.”

_I need them._

“Your other friend is still there,” the demon says, “but I cannot unmake him. I will return his life to you, for Cabeswater.”

If there’s one thing Ronan’s learnt, it’s to be cautious when he’s dealing with dangerous magic. “And Adam?”

“Take him,” the demon says. “I cannot unmake him either. He will not let me. Take his hand, and don’t look back.”

Towards the end, Ronan hears Adam’s voice overlapping the demon’s again: _don’t look back_.

Ronan takes a step forward and suddenly Adam is right in front of him, and they stumble unceremoniously into each other’s arms. It’s only when he’s holding something tangible that Ronan realises he’s shaking from head to toe—that he’s sobbing.

“ _Adam—_ ”

“Ronan,” Adam says, “Ronan, I’m here.”

“You’re alive,” is all Ronan can say.

Adam pulls him in closer. “I don’t know. I don’t feel alive.”

“You are, you are,” Ronan says. “You’re—you’re so alive.”

“I feel,” Adam says, “half-remembered.”

Half isn’t good enough. Ronan runs his fingers from the nape of Adam’s neck and up through his hair, and brings their faces together for a kiss. It feels like so long since they last kissed, even though it’s still so new. This is how they’re meant to be.

Ronan is so in love that he almost forgets they’re in a dream forest with a demon breathing down their necks. The demon’s voice startles him: “Leave.”

“We should go,” Adam says, a breath away from Ronan’s lips.

“We have to,” Ronan says. “The others—Blue and Henry, I left them with Gansey on the highway. I don’t know how long I’ve been here.”

Adam laughs, that affected-horrified sound that means he’s trying hard to be angry with Ronan for being slack, but he can’t even fake it. “You left two teenagers and a dead body alone in the middle of the rain?”

“Gansey will be alive,” Ronan says, more sure than he’s ever been. “He _is_.”

This time, Adam awards him a genuine smile. “Let’s live, too.”

“LEAVE,” the demon says, raising its voice. “Lead him away, and don’t look back at him.”

Adam’s hold tightens. “Ronan?”

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Adam asks. He sighs and steps back far enough to take Ronan’s hands. “Let’s just go. This place is giving me the creeps.”

“Yeah,” Ronan says. “Me too.”

The demon’s words cling to him like the heavy rain outside the BMW—so near, so far away. Ronan keeps just one of Adam’s hands in his and turns away, leading them out of the forest.

Where behind him had been only the strange emptiness, there’s now a thicket of trees, the same unresponsive Cabeswater. The forest floor is thick with leaves, like quicksand clinging to the soles of Ronan’s shoes with every step he takes. He keeps going, and he doesn’t look back.

One moment his ears start ringing, and the next his vision turns—he’s back in the darkness. There are fewer lights now, nothing to guide his way. He walks on instinct, moving where he thinks he ought to, relying on memory to guide him. Maybe, he thinks, they’ll find their way out whatever happens. This is his dream, after all. He should be able to choose the path they take out of it. But no matter how much he wills himself to wake up—that when he opens his eyes he’ll still be sitting in the BMW with the windows wound down, and Adam will be by his side—he can’t; he hasn’t reached the right point yet.

He opens his mouth to ask Adam how he’s doing, but he still can’t talk. Longing for reassurance, he squeezes Adam’s hand. After a beat, Adam squeezes back. He’s still there. Ronan wonders if he’s trying to talk too, if he’s just as terrified by this uncharted territory. If he could turn around, look Adam in the eye, communicate without words like they’re learning to do—but he doesn’t. He doesn’t turn around.

Ronan makes a silent promise to Adam: _I will be your hands. I will be your eyes._

The lights begin to flicker out. There’s still nothing to anchor this dream to physical space, to anything that Ronan can identify. He loses sight of his body, of where his chest attaches to his shoulder to his arm, and although he can still feel Adam, he can’t see their connection, and that drives the air out of him.

“Adam?”

Maybe he only thinks it. There’s no reply.

What would happen if he _did_ turn around? It’s his own dream. If no-one else, the Greywaren should be able to steer fate in his direction. And yet, he can’t shake the feeling that the demon’s warning really meant something. That if he looks back at Adam, something—but what?—will happen.

The air grows cold, and Ronan walks on. He thinks about Blue and Henry, and Gansey—they could be halfway back to Henrietta by now, in the night, under the rain. He thinks about the light at the end of the tunnel. He’s so close to waking, to the BMW, to Adam… Adam, who is right behind him, and yet. And yet.

 _Don’t look back_. But Ronan’s always been bad at following the rules.


End file.
